Global Warming Problem/Solution Essay

For the past two centuries, at an accelearned run averageting rate, the underlying composition of the Earths standard melody has been materi eithery altered by the fossil- evoke effluvia of machine culture. Human-induced heating plant of the Earths climate is emerging as one of the major scientific, social, and sparing issues of the twenty-first century, as the effects of climate change become unvarnished in everyday life in locations as varied as small island nations of the Pacific nautical and the shores of the Arctic Ocean. The glasshouse effect is non an idea which is new(a) to science.It has merely become more comfortably detectable in our time as temperatures have risen and scientists have devised more sophisticated slip centering to measure and forecast atmospheric processes. The atmospheric balance of trace gases actually started to change beyond inherent bounds at the dawn of the industrial age, with the first large- get over burning of fossil fuels. It became n oticeable in the 1880s, and an important force in world(prenominal) climate change by ab come in 1980. After an step up debate, the idea that human activity is warming the earth in potentially damaging ways became for the most part accepted in scientific circles by 1995.Addressing the consequences of global warming provide demand, on a ecumenic scale, the kind of social and economic mobilization experienced in the unite States only during its birthing transmutation and World War II, and therein lies a trouble. The buildup of glasshouse gases in the atmosphere is a nearly unseeable, additive crisis. Carbon dioxide is not going to bomb Pearl Harbor to kick start the mobilization. Author Jonathan Weiner observes, We do not respond to emergencies that unfold in slow motion. We do not respond adequately to the invisible (Weiner, 1990, 241).It has been said (not for attribution) that the best thing which could happen to raise worldwide concern about global warming would be a qu ick collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which would raise worldwide sea level a notable number of feet over a very short time. When stock brokers feet unhorse wet on the cause floor of New York Citys World Trade Center, all the worlds competing economic interests might mobilize together and provide the sociopolitical responses necessary to address the atmospheres overload of greenhouse gases before it is too youthful.The same water that could lap at the ground floor of the Trade Center in addition would ruin most farmers in Egypt and Bangladesh and slosh in the lobbies of ice towers of Hong Kong and Tokyo. Perhaps, only then, might all of humankind heed the implications of Chief Seahtls f arwell lyric a century and a half ago. We may be brothers (and sisters) after all. So far, humankinds collective nervous systemnational and international leadership, public opinion, and so forthhasnt through much about global warming.As of this writing, the flora and fauna of the plane t Earth are til now in the position of a laboratory frog submerged in steadily warming water. This is not a secret crisis, just a politically unpalatable one. Al board, in Earth in the Balance Ecology and the Human Spirit, raised a sociopolitical call for mobilization against human-induced warming of the Earth This establish is crucial. A choice to do nothing in response to the mounting evidence is actually a choice to continue and even accelerate the reckless environmental destruction that is creating the catastrophe at fade (Gore, 1992, 37).In his book, Gore, then a U. S. senator, called for a global Marshall Plan, to include stabilization of world population, the fast creation and development of environmentally appropriate technologies, and a comprehensive and ubiquitous change in the economic rules of the road by which we measure the impact of our decisions on the environment (Gore, 1992, 306). Eight years after Gore issued his manifesto, fossil-fuel releases had risen in the United States. Gore had captured the Democratic Partys nomination for president of the United States, and global warming had slipped from campaign radar.From this vantage point, one imagines the world lurching through the twenty-first century as global public opinion slowly galvanizes around year after year of high temperature records, and as public policy only slowly begins to catch up with the temperature curve. The temperature (and especially the dewpoint) may wake the global frog before he becomes poached meat. Whatever the outcome of the public policy debate, the odds are extremely high that the weather of the year 2100 will be notably warmer than today, as greenhouse forcing exerts an ever-stronger role in the grand dance of the atmosphere which produces climate.Ross Gelbspan observes, world(a) warming need not accept a reduction of living standards, but it does demand a rapid shift in patterns of fuel consumptionreduced use of oil, coal, and the lighter-carboned natural gas to an parsimoniousness more reliant on solar dexterity, fuel cells, hydrogen gas, wind, biomass, and other renewable energy sources. It is doubtful that capitalistic grocery store forces will pack about this shift on their own, because market prices of fossil fuels do not incorporate their environmental costs. (Gelbspan, 2004)George Woodwell has been quoted as saying, For all practical purposes, the era of fossil fuels has passed, and its time to move on to the new era of renewable sources of energy. The other alternative, says Woodwell, is to accept the fact that the Earth is not simply moving toward a new equilibrium in temperature. It is entering a period of continuous, progressive, open-ended warming (Gordon and Suzuki, 2001, 219). In Jeremy Leggetts opinion, The unambiguously frustrating thing about global warmingto the m any people who see its dangersis that the solutions are obvious. at that place is no denying, however, that creating the necessary changes will req uire paradigm shifts in human behaviorparticularly in the field of cooperation between nation-stateswhich have literally no precedent in human history. at that place is no single issue in human affairs that is of greater importance. (Leggett, 2000, 457) According to a Greenpeace give out edited by Leggett, The main routes to surviving the greenhouse threat are energy efficiency, renewable forms of energy productionless greenhouse-gas-intensive agriculture, stopping deforestation, and reforestation (Leggett, 2000, 462).Greenpeace also recommends redirecting spending away from armaments and toward development of a sustainable energy for the future of humankind (Leggett, 2000, 470). Of the broader picture, Michael MacCracken writes, The underlying challenge is for industrialized society to achieve a match and sustainable coexistence with the environment, one that permits use of the environment as a resource, but in a way that preserves its vitality and richness for future generatio ns.The challenge is to transform our ways before the world is irrevocably changed toward displacing militarization and the ever-increasing push for greater national consumption as the primary driving forces behind industrial activity. (MacCracken, 2001, 35) According to Donald Goldberg and Stephen Porter of the Center for International Global Law The Clinton administration has bungled repeated chances to uprise domestic measures. For example, recent legislation proposed by the White House to restructure the electric utility labor could have been crafted to require utilities to reduce their carbon-dioxide emissions.In fact, the environmental Protection Agency lobbied hard for the authority to trim back a cap-and-trade program on utilities CO2 emissions, similar to the trading system that has lowered sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions in a cost-effective way. This was a golden opportunity, as the restructuring bill is projected to save the average consumer slightly $200 a year, which would have more than offset the cost of reducing GHG greenhouse-gas emissions. Unfortunately, the White House chose to resign this opportunity. (Goldberg and Porter, 1998)According to Goldberg and Porter, loopholes in the Kyoto communications protocol, adopted at the insistence of the United States, permit richer countries to avoid many of its mandated emission reductions by purchasing allowances from other countries through the protocols flexibility mechanisms. The Buenos Aires Climate Conference (1998) negotiated a mechanism allowing trade in greenhouse gas emission rights in two markets. The first market would allow sellers, nations which exceed greenhouse gas-reduction targets set in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, to offer their rights for sale to buyers, countries which have not met their targets.The sanction market, the Clean Development Mechanism, will allow industrialized countries to meet part of their greenhouse-gas-reduction quotas by transferring clean engineering to poor er countries so that antipollution projects can be carried out there. If it buys all (or most) of its reductions, Goldberg and Porter write, the United States will not get its own house in order. In the long run, efficiency and productivity in the U. S. economy will suffer because domestic industry will be shielded from any incentive to adapt (Goldberg and Porter, 1998).Under these provisions, the United States could purchase emission reduction credits from nations, such as Russia and Ukraine, which reduced their greenhouse-gas emissions during the mid-nineties because their economic infrastructure collapsed. The continuing political wrangling over the Kyoto Protocol illustrates why the world is responding so slowly to the impending crisis of global warming. Climate diplomacy remains an arena dominated by disceptation of special (mainly national) interests. Meanwhile, a few countries, most of them in Europe, are taking steps to mitigate greenhouse forcing on their own.While Britis h emissions of greenhouse gases by the year 2000 had fallen between five and cardinal percentage compared to the Kyoto Protocol 1990 targets, emissions in the United States rose 11 percent between 1990 and 1998. Canadas greenhouse-gas emissions rose 13 percent during the 1990s, while some(prenominal) European countries (including Britain) made substantial progress toward meeting the goals of the Kyoto Protocol by reducing their greenhouse-gas emissions as much as 10 percent compared to 1990 levels.Denmark (which produces less than one percent of humankinds greenhouse gases) underwent something of a mobilization against global warming during the 1990s. Denmark was planning farms of skyscraper-sized windmills in the trade union and Baltic seas that, if plans materialize, will supply half the nations electric effect within 30 years. The Danish wind-energy manufacturers association believes that electricity produced through wind power on a large scale will be financially competiti ve with power from plants burning fossil fuels, which will be phased out if wind power proves itself.Svend Auken, Denmarks environmental and energy minister, said that with half of his countrys power coming from Norwegian hydroelectric plants and the other half from wind power, the country is planning to meet its electricity needs within three decades while reducing carbon dioxide production to nearly zero. The wind farms must(prenominal) prove their endurance in winter storms and stand up to the corrosion of seawater, but if they can, Denmarks windmills will prevent the production of 14 million tons of carbon dioxide a year.While the fossil-fuel economy remained steadfastly entrenched in most of the world at the turn of the millennium, gains were being achieved in some basic areas of energy conservation. In 1994, for example, the average person in the United States was recycling 380 pounds a year, up from 62 pounds in 1960, a 613 percent increase (Casten, 1998, 101102). Following the passage of the Clean Air morsel in 1972, the United States also made a concerted effort to limit the production of azotic oxides by gas turbine engines. Before regulation, the typical gas turbine engine emitted 200 parts per million (p. p. m. ).Since then, several technological innovations have reduced emissions to below 10 p. p. m.. Technology was being developed in the late 1990s which could reduce the rate to two to three p. p. m. (Casten, 1998, 117118). The problem is at once very simple, and also astoundingly complex. Increasing human populations, rising affluence, and continued colony on energy derived from fossil fuels are at the crux of the issue. The complexity of the problem is illustrated by the degree to which the daily lives of machine-age peoples depend on fossil fuels. This dependence gives rise to an array of local, regional, and national economic interests.These interests cause tensions between nations attending negotiations to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions . The cacophony of debate also illustrates the strength and diversity of established interests which are being assiduously protected. Add to the human elements of the problem the sheer randomness of climate (as well as the amount of time which passes before a tending(p) level of greenhouse gases is actually factored into climate), and the problem becomes complex and intractable enough to (thus far) seriously impede any serious, unified effort by humankind to fashion solutions.ReferencesCasten, Thomas R. (1998). Turning Off the Heat why America Must Double Energy Efficiency to Save Money and Reduce Global Warming. Amherst, N. Y. Prometheus Books. Gelbspan, Ross. (2004). A Global Warming. American Prospect, 31 (March/April). Goldberg, Donald, and Stephen Porter. (1998). In Focus Global Climate Change. Center for International Environmental Law, May. Gordon, Anita, and David Suzuki. (2001). Its a Matter of Survival. Cambridge Harvard University Press. Gore, Albert. (1992).Earth in th e Balance Ecology and the Human Spirit. Boston Houghton-Mifflin. Leggett, Jeremy, ed. (2000). Global Warming The Greenpeace Report. New York Oxford University Press. MacCracken, Michael. (1991). Greenhouse Gases Changing the Global Climate. In Joseph P. Knox and Ann Foley Scheuring, eds. , Global Climate Change and calcium. Berkeley University of California Press, 2639. Weiner, Jonathan. (1990). The Next One Hundred Years Shaping the Fate of Our Living Earth. New York petite Books